Teaching Children with Dyslexia to Read

Do you have a child who has struggled to read for years, or who has been diagnosed with dyslexia? You are not alone. It is estimated that 1 in 5 people — about 20% of the population — have dyslexia.^1,2 That is a huge number of children laboring to learn to read, and without the right instruction, those labors are disheartening and rarely pay off. This paper explains what dyslexia is, how it affects learning to read, the kind of instruction dyslexic children actually need, and how the Orton-Gillingham approach teaches them to read.

What is dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a brain-based type of learning disability that specifically impairs a person’s ability to read. These individuals read at levels significantly lower than expected, despite having normal intelligence. Common characteristics are difficulty with phonological processing, spelling, and/or rapid visual-verbal responding.

— National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke³

There is no known single cause, but dyslexia often runs in families. It is believed that more than half of dyslexic people inherited the pattern from one or both parents.⁴ That means children with dyslexia frequently have close relatives who also found reading hard.

Here is the problem: school systems identify only about 4% of students as dyslexic, while the real number is closer to 20%.¹ Most children with reading difficulties go unnoticed and never get the help they need. Dyslexia is not laziness, it is not a result of poor parenting or teaching, and it is not a lack of intelligence. In fact, one reason it hides so well is that dyslexic children are often especially bright — they can appear to read a book when they have actually memorized the words. Parents and teachers have to look closely at decoding and spelling to see what is really happening.

How does dyslexia affect learning to read?

Most research points to phonological processing — hearing and manipulating the sounds in words — as the core difficulty. English phonics patterns are not obvious, so they are not intuitively grasped by dyslexic learners. Dyslexic students can also struggle to learn procedures and lock in routines,⁵ likely because of weaker verbal short-term memory.⁶ They need far more repetition to make those routines automatic.¹ A skill can look mastered one day and be gone the next,⁵ which makes catching up to peers genuinely hard.

• Weakness in phonemic awareness — trouble hearing and working with individual sounds.
• Difficulty with procedural learning — routines and steps don’t stick automatically.⁵
• Poor verbal short-term memory — holding sound sequences in mind is taxing.⁶
• Difficulty catching up to peers’ reading skills — mastery takes much more repetition.⁵

To make matters worse, many schools teach with a “whole language” or “global” approach that asks children to memorize lists of sight words and hopes they will discover phonics on their own. But because dyslexic children struggle with phonological processing, those patterns never click, and they never learn to decode unfamiliar words.⁷ They need direct, repeated instruction that a traditional classroom rarely provides.² Research suggests whole-language is an ineffective way to teach any child to read.⁸

What kind of instruction do children with dyslexia need?

Overwhelming research shows that explicit, systematic phonics instruction can teach virtually all children to read. Explicit means the rules and procedures are broken into small, graspable chunks. Systematic means reading is taught in a fixed, logical order. For dyslexic students, that means the rules are taught in small steps, in a sensible sequence, with enough repetition to reach mastery.⁵

Systematic phonics instruction has been used widely over a long period of time with positive results … explicit, systematic phonics instruction is a valuable and essential part of a successful classroom reading program.

— National Reading Panel⁹

When we only teach children to memorize words, they have no way to tackle a new word they have never seen. When we teach the rules and sounds of English, we hand them the keys to read almost anything.

• Phonics — the sound-letter code at the center of reading.
• Explicit instruction — rules taught directly, not left to be guessed.
• Systematic learning — a planned sequence that builds on itself.
• Repeated instruction — enough practice to reach automatic mastery.

How does the Orton-Gillingham approach teach children with dyslexia to read?

One research-supported method that delivers all of this is the Orton-Gillingham approach.⁹ Developed in the 1930s and 40s, it is still considered the “gold standard” for teaching dyslexic children to read.⁵ It pairs an explicit, structured approach with a multisensory model to teach and reinforce literacy skills.¹¹

• Phonics-based — correlates sounds with letters or groups of letters.
• Explicit — breaks rules and procedures into small steps.
• Systematic — taught in a specific order, building on prior lessons.
• Multisensory — uses sight, sound, touch, and movement together to learn a concept.
• Repetition — multiple activities and senses review learning and build stronger neural pathways.

In practice, students are directly taught how to decode and spell using letter sounds, phonics, and language rules, in an order that builds on what they already know. Because it is multisensory, learning is repeated through several channels at once: seeing the print, hearing the words, and tapping or tracing them. That repetition builds stronger neural pathways in the brain.^4,1 Just like any skill worth having, repeated practice improves reading. And because the approach is so effective, it is not only for dyslexic students — every beginning reader can benefit from it.

The bottom line

For a child who has struggled for years, reading can feel impossible. There is no cure for dyslexia — but the brain can be retrained, and with the Orton-Gillingham approach, dyslexic students learn to read.⁵ Progress often shows up quickly once direct reading and phonics instruction begins.² For many dyslexic children, learning to read is not a sprint but a marathon — and the reward at the finish line is profound relief, a newfound sense of empowerment, and the belief that they can conquer any obstacle.¹